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Saturday, November 29, 2008

Probability & culpability

I appreciate Paul Manata’s recent post on probability and inexcusability. I’m going to second his position with a few supporting arguments of my own. In the process, I’d like to reorient the discussion a bit.

1.Before we discuss what renders a sinner guilty before God, it might be useful to discuss guilt generally.

i) Let’s take the insanity defense.

a) In my opinion, for a normal adult not to know the difference between right and wrong is culpable rather than exculpatory. A normal adult is supposed to know the difference. So, not knowing the difference between good and evil is, itself, evil.

b) But suppose someone commits murder because he has brain cancer. In that case, I think we’d agree that he’s in a condition of diminished responsibility. He’s not responsible for his actions.

c) There also seems to be a class of people, like Bobby Fischer and Ted Kaczynski, who work themselves into a state of mental illness. They weren’t always insane.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Kaczynski was clinically insane at the time he committed murder. Is that an exculpatory circumstance?

I’d say, no. He’s still guilty of murder because he is guilty of psyching himself into a condition of criminal insanity.

The analogy I’m making is this: suppose, for the sake of argument, that the unbeliever has successfully forgotten what he used to know about God. Does that render him blameless before God?

No, for he’s guilty of forgetting what he used to know about God. That, of itself, is an evil thing to do.

d) We might also use the example of a torturer or serial killer who’s become desensitized to the pain and suffering he inflicts on others. At the outset of his career, he felt a twinge of conscience about the way he treated his victims. But over time, he’s become callous and unfeeling.

Is that culpable or exculpatory? Clearly the former.

2.Now let’s approach this issue from a different angle. Can I be culpable if I fail to take reasonable precautions in some situations? Here, “reasonable” would fall short of certainty.

For example, if a hotel is on fire, should the firemen conduct a sweep of the hotel, floor-by-floor and room-by-room to see if all the guests got out in time?

Suppose the fire chief didn’t order them to do that. As a result, 20 guests died of smoke inhalation.

Suppose the fire chief justifies his inaction as follows: the firemen didn’t have time to knock on every room or check every room. They didn’t have time to check to see if anyone was hiding under the bed or cowering in the closets.

Since they didn’t have time to conduct a thorough search of the premises, there was no point in conducting even a cursory search since the results of a cursory search would be inconclusive.

We would still regard the inaction of the fire chief as culpable. Although any search within the time allotted (before the hotel burned down) would be less than exhaustive, he still had an obligation to make a good faith effort to do the best he could under the circumstances.

The analogy I’m making is this: even if, for the sake of argument, we say the unbeliever’s evidence for God is merely probable rather than conclusive, an unbeliever is still culpable if he responds unreasonably in the face of the available evidence.

I’m not equating this with Paul’s argument in Rom 1 (which is a separate question). I’m just discussing general grounds for culpable conduct.

3.Finally, Paul grounds culpability in more than one factor. Human culpability is overdetermined. The suppression of revelation is one ground.

But in chapter 5, he also grounds culpability in the sin of Adam.

That’s interesting because, unlike chapter 1, it doesn’t depend on the knowledge of the interested party. It might depend on Adam’s knowledge, but not on the knowledge of his posterity.

Of course, many people think that original sin is unfair. At the moment, I’m not trying to defend Paul’s argument (which I’ve done elsewhere). I’m merely discussing the Pauline grounds for guilt.

And, of course, Paul also grounds guilt in actual sin.

The upshot is that the unbeliever could be “inexcusable” for a number of different reasons.

10 comments:

"But suppose someone commits murder because he has brain cancer. In that case, I think we’d agree that he’s in a condition of diminished responsibility. He’s not responsible for his actions."

This sounds reasonable to me (and just). However, do you not believe that God could "justly" condemn unborn infants to Hell despite being in a state similar to the man with brain cancer? In fact, I might suggest that their level of "responsibility" is nil. Infant damnation is embraced by many, though.

It makes little sense to me: we humans are willing to take one's level of responsibility into account when sentencing them, yet God can not only condemn people who do not have the capacity or reason to even think (let alone differentiate between good and evil) but sentence them for the sins committed by others (i.e., original sin).

I have been following this blog post, How To Actually Talk To Atheists (If You're Christian), and its thread, and this most recent comment by Bill Dunlap does an excellent job of revealing the hostile chasm between belief and unbelief by pushing out the positions to their logical consequences and implications:

"Susan, there are a few comments you made that sort of bother me.

"God has said that the wages of sin is Death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ. Jesus suffered in my stead. I deserve God's coming judgement. I deserve, in God's just economy, to be punished. The thing is, God provided a way out of that punishment. It costs me what? I need merely to believe that Jesus that Jesus is the divine son of God, that he lived in the flesh on this earth at a point in history, he died.... suffering the death I deserve, paid the price for me, rose from the dead, and that IF I come to Him in humble repentance (recognizing my sin as an offense to God and turning from it) and receive Him..... then I will be forgiven.... seen by him as completely righteous as Christ is. That's a great deal if you ask me!"

This really disturbs me and makes me hope that you find a good therapist to deal with these really deep-seated self esteem issues that seem to be going on here. True, I have been properly bitched out by professional psychologists for psycho-analyzing over the web, but really, stop and read what you posted here. What did you, Susan, do to deserve a ghastly death? Were you Leonard Lake who murdered and tortured innocent women or are you a 95 year old ex-concentration camp guard? Susan you have done nothing in that league. You are a normal human being with normal human urges, and once in a while you make a big or little mistake. Big deal. The self-hatred you are showing makes me feel very sorry for all of you and wonder what I can do to reach out to you and convince you that you are not a bad person because your internalized invisible pink unicorn says you are.

"This is Fact. Whether you believe it, ignore it, are hardened toward it, are angry about it..... it's STILL fact. I would seriously look into it if I were you. Your life depends on it. Hell is a real destination for those who reject God's only path to forgiveness."

Hell does not exist. Hell is an idea that was brought into the Christian dogma long after the death of Christ. It is certainly not a part of the Jewish faith (which I was raised in.) A friend on mine did a long study on the history of the belief in hell. You should take a look.

"If your excuse for ignoring Jesus is that so-called Christian are lousy sinners, then so-be-it. "

No, Susan, my excuse for ignoring Jesus is that he never existed, not even as a historical figure. The story of Jesus is told amongst the backdrop of the most socially unstable time in Jewish history. Jews were fighting Jews over the correct way to kill Romans, and street corner preachers were calling themselves the messiah. Should somebody have come along and preached what Jesus was said to have preached, he would have been torn apart by the crowds. Jewish law was a matter of national pride to the Israeli Jews of the time. Revising the law would have been suicide. Christianity came out of Hellenic Judaism, and the writers of the Gospels never even saw Jerusalem much less knew Christ.

You are asking us to believe logical and historical fallacies. That is simply not going to happen. There is no God. There was no Jesus, and the sin you fear is simply unrealistic expectations imposed on you by a bunch of greed mongers more concerned that their politicians are elected so that the money keeps pouring into their pockets."

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And if the Christ-denier were to say that I'm culpable as well for my delusional belief in Christ, I'm happy to embrace that when s/he embraces his/her culpability for no belief in the Divine Christ.

James brings up the issue of infant salvation again, even though we addressed the issue when he brought it up earlier. See the comments section of the thread here. Notice, too, that James had to be corrected on other issues in that same thread, including issues that had already been addressed recently. If you correct James, he keeps repeating the same error over and over again anyway. He didn’t make much of an effort to study the subject of infant salvation in that previous thread, and he apparently hasn’t made much of an effort to do so since then. We told him that we had some material on the subject in our archives, but he apparently doesn’t want to look. He doesn’t interact with what’s been said, but instead acts as if the subject is coming up for the first time. Why does James post questions and comments in so many threads when he’s so uninterested in doing research, so uninterested in considering what people say in response to him, and so uninterested in addressing their questions and comments directed at him? Why should Steve take the time to keep addressing James’ questions and comments, which he posts in so many threads, even when those questions and comments have such tangential relevance to the topic of the thread? I don’t think that somebody who’s doing as much work as Steve is doing, and work that’s so significant, should be expected to keep taking so much time to interact with somebody who’s behaving as irresponsibly as James.

In principle, I agree with everything you say. (Paul, I agreed with everything you said in your post too and thought it made good points.)

What I'm curious about is this:

--"even if, for the sake of argument, we say the unbeliever’s evidence for God is merely probable rather than conclusive, an unbeliever is still culpable if he responds unreasonably in the face of the available evidence."

Hypothetically, could we say that, in order to render the unbeliever morally culpable, the evidence must be more than .5 (or 50%) probable? (Say, 51% or .6) So that if it is more probably true than not, the unbeliever has been rendered morally culpable.

The problem I'm having is that I don't see where any data has been given to show that Christianity is more likely true than not true *from the arguments themselves.*

In other words, where is the data on probabilistic arguments for God that show, in some objective manner, them to be more probably true than not? Do you know of any sources that explore this further? (Paul mentioned in the other thread that Suddeth may discuss it more in his upcoming book, which I look forward to.)

It gets even messier when one factors in whether or not a person understands the evidence presented to them and then whether it has been presented in a way that they *should* have understood it etc... Or, when one factors in evidence that both parties may have over looked and if they should have been aware of it. Right now, I don't see how any apologist can make an unqualified claim that the *arguments* for God are so probable that *they* render an unbeliever culpable.

“Jason, I don't have 6,000 hours to read the copious amounts of text published here. Plus, my memory isn't so good (so I'm told - although people mistake it for me not paying attention).”

It doesn’t take “6,000 hours” to read something like an archived article Steve has written on infant salvation or to read Steve and Gene’s responses to you in the thread I linked. And if you don’t have the time and memory to participate in these discussions in the manner I suggested, why do you keep involving yourself in these threads? You’re one of the most frequent posters. If your behavior is a result of time and memory constraints, wouldn’t refraining from posting so much, or refraining from posting at all, be the responsible thing to do? But just how bad is your memory? You keep remembering all of the objections to Christianity that you repeat in thread after thread. But you can’t remember the responses to those objections that Christians, like the ones who post here, have provided? Is it a selective memory problem that favors bad arguments against Christianity?

You write:

“You also do realize that there are divergent opinions within Christianity, right (even among Calvinists)? Just because Steve or Paul addressed it in a previous post doesn't mean it's ‘settled’.”

No, I didn’t realize that Christians disagree on the subject. And I did think that the fact that Steve addressed the issue would mean that all professing Christians worldwide would stop disagreeing about it. Yes, when I referred to how Steve had addressed the issue before, I was saying that he had “settled” the issue just as you describe above. But now I know better.

You write:

“In any rate, if I repeat myself, please bear with me, and just send me the link.”

We’ve been bearing with you for a long time. And we’ve given you many links on many subjects. But, as you’ve told me above, you “don’t have 6,000 hours to read the copious amounts of text published here”.

If you have some sort of significant memory problem, then I sympathize with you. But nobody’s making you post here. That’s your choice. And you’ve frequently made comments that suggest you haven’t studied the relevant issues much, you’ve frequently misrepresented what Christians believe, you’ve frequently asked questions about highly tangential issues, and you’ve frequently ignored what people have written in response to you.

Since we're touching on the subject of original sin, there's something I wanted to ask. I've heard it said a few times on this blog that Adam was essentially the best of us - the best representative God could've chosen. That any one of us in the same situation would have fallen victim to the same fate. I'm wondering what the biblical basis for this is (i.e., are there any verses that spell this out). Or is it more of an inference from the available data? Thanks.